Hewlett-Packard scientists on April 8 are expected to report advances in the design of a new class of diminutive switches capable of replacing transistors as computer chips shrink closer to the atomic scale, reports the New York Times—and these so-called “memristors,” or memory resistors, could lead to a new class of computing devices. The devices were conceived in 1971 by Leon O. Chua, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, but they were not put into effect until 2008 at the HP lab in Palo Alto, Calif. They are simpler than today’s semiconducting transistors, can store information even in the absence of an electrical current, and—according to a report in the journal Nature—can be used for both data processing and storage applications. Memristor-based systems also hold out the prospect of fashioning analog computing systems that function more like biological brains, Dr. Chua said. “Our brains are made of memristors,” he said, referring to the function of biological synapses. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains.”
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Universities push to get students counted in 2010 census
It was 5 p.m. in the lobby of the library of Metropolitan State University, and Clara Ware was sitting behind a table covered with pens, notepads, and buttons with the Census 2010 logo, calling out like a sideshow barker.
“Here comes a prospect,” she said as a student walked up.
Ware explained that filling out the census form this spring could mean more money for the university and the surrounding neighborhood, one of the oldest and most diverse in the city. The student took some knickknacks and promised to fill out her form. Ware smiled.…Read More